SBS2003 Printers & Faxes not opening

[swancd]

All of a sudden on the SBS 2003 server I can't open Printers and Faxes. Everything else in the Control Panel works fine. Can't get to Printers & Faxes from the start menu or from the control panel.

Printer spooling is running. Server been rebooted but still nothing.

Reason I need to get in is because people can't print to a printer which is connected to the server.

Suggestions please.

Thanks!

UPDATE:

I can't restart the Print Spooler service. It won't stop or restart. I get the error:

Could not stop the Print Spooler service on Local Computer

Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

Also I can't uninstall the printer driver (from the start menu, under HP I have the Uninstall HP 3030. When I click uninstall nothing happens?

Edited June 9, 2008 by swancd

[cluberti]

My suggestion is to disable the spooler service, then restart. Once the box is back up, use the cleanspl.exe tool (from the W2K3 resource kit) to delete all of the print spooler's contents, minus the inbox processors like TCP/IP, LPD, etc. (you'll be prompted to delete these, please choose not to!). You may have to start the spooler service to do this, but I don't think it's required.

After that, set the spooler service back to auto and reboot, and you should have a working (clean, but working) spooler. In the future, always make a spooler backup using the Printmig.exe tool before adding/updating a printer queue/driver, just in case situations like this arise. That way, you'll have a backup you can restore once cleanspl.exe is finished.

[rjgarnold]

I actually happened upon this post because I was having trouble installing Adobe Acrobat Pro 8.0. Kept saying "stopping services. service to stop: print spooler. Could not stop the Print Spooler service on Local Computer. ERror 1053. Service didn't respond to start or control request in a timely fashion." Adobe "installation support" was, as usual, absolutely no help. They suggested going to run-->services.msc-->print spooler and stopping the print spooler. However, that didn't work. Wouldn't stop. I did as you suggested and used the cleanspl.exe tool, and also installed msiccu2 (Microsoft Windows Installer Cleaner; available free on microsoft.com website), which found that Acrobat was still running, even though I couldn't see it in task manager or control panel-->add programs. BTW, after using the cleanspl.exe tool and after restart, I did go back into run-->services.msc-->print spooler and stopped the print spooler, which stopped immediately this time, rather than hanging up. Don't know if this was the right thing to do, but Acrobat (finally!) installed with no problem. Thanks again for all the help; this was hours and hours of aggravation!